Thursday, March 24, 2011

How the saying “Everything happens for a reason” combines presumption with obtuseness.

Last week, I posted an entry examining and denigrating the saying “Everything happens for a reason” (“A False Truism,” March 13, 2011). I subsequently learned that, by a curious chance, an article appeared a few days later at Cracked.com under the title “Five Popular Phrases That Make You Look Like an Idiot,” in which the very same phrase appears at the head of the list (though at the end of the article). Reading another writer’s attempt to identify what makes this saying so irritating gives me occasion to reconsider my own analysis.

I was not surprised to find that the author, whose name is given as “Gladstone,” does not share my logical objections to the phrase. Perhaps no one without some years of study of philosophy will do so. Gladstone even gives the saying a pass as far as its literal meaning is concerned:

I suppose this cliché wouldn’t be intolerable if it were merely meant to be taken literally. Everything does happen for a reason. People die young because they get hit by trains or get cancer. People are maimed and disfigured in wars because of bombs. I mean, if that’s all this cliche were trying to convey then it would just be vaguely annoying. You’d assume the speaker were just some mental deficient who says things like “water is wet,” “ice cream is yummy,” or “Tosh is funny.”

I, of course, disagree. Gladstone in effect takes the phrase to be equivalent in literal meaning to the truism “For everything that happens, there is a reason why it happens.” But in my estimation he lets the phrase off too easily. Getting hit by a train or getting cancer may be the reason why someone dies young, but it is not a reason for which someone dies young. People do not die for a reason, as dying is not something that people do, or can do, intentionally. They can intentionally kill themselves or get themselves killed or let themselves die (i.e., refrain from taking action to prevent or delay their dying); but “dying” does not name a possible intentional action, nor even an action at all. Dying is something that befalls one; accordingly, it cannot intelligibly be said to be done “for a reason.” The same goes for any occurrence that is not an intentional action.

For the sake of simplicity, I will hereafter use the phrase “mere
happening” for anything that happens that is not the intentional act of
an agent. Thus, for instance, someone’s dying is a mere happening;
someone’s killing himself is an action.

I argued in my previous piece that the logical confusions in this saying contribute to its currency by allowing it to pass—in lazy, sloppy, or corrupt minds—for a truism. But even if that is so, perhaps logical confusion is not the most objectionable feature of the saying. It is happens to be the sort of feature that tends to attract my attention, because of my peculiar irritability toward logical confusion and the satisfaction that I find in exposing it. But the logical confusion is just the means by which the phrase conveys its pernicious half-hidden meaning. That meaning combines presumption and obtuseness, as Gladstone vividly points out:

But the annoying thing about this phrase is that the speaker believes he/she has some inside track to God or Fate or whatever mystic unseen hand controls the universe. As if there is a power and that power decided there was an actual reason to inflict a newborn baby with Trisomy 18 or have a woman get gang raped. And given the existence of this rational force—that operates only with justification and reason—who are you to question why someone ravaged your wife, or blew apart your son, or took your leg? This cliché insists that either happy endings always exist (“see, they never would have found that tumor, unless they were repairing that machete wound to your abdomen”) or if there is no happy ending for you then your suffering was part of some greater plan that benefited another (“don’t be sad that you were imprisoned for twenty years by a racist jury for a crime you didn’t commit, I mean, think about the valuable lesson you’ve taught us about bias in criminal juries!”)

To say “Everything happens for
a reason” is in effect to deny that there are any of what I termed mere happenings, except perhaps by an arbitrary choice of phrasing. It is to hold that the occurrences that appear to us to be mere happenings, such as someone’s dying of cancer or the fall of a leaf, are actually made to happen by an agent—presumably an all-powerful one that works in ways beyond our powers of observation. That would be, in Gladstone’s words, “God or Fate or whatever mystic unseen hand controls the universe.”

This much is implied by the phrase; and by itself it is outrageous presumption enough. But, as Gladstone rightly observes, the person who says “Everything happens for a reason” typically claims even more than this. It would be compatible with this saying to believe that the universe is governed by a petty, jealous, unjust, vindictive, capricious bully of a deity—such as the YHWH of the Hebrew Bible, for instance (see the opening paragraph of chapter 2 of Richard Dawkins’s The God Illusion Delusion*). Even people who believe that collection of texts to be divinely revealed tend to have a more favorable conception of the invisible agent behind the world’s scenes. They tend to believe, in defiance of the text, that God is just, loving, forgiving, wise, and so forth. Certainly Scripture abounds with passages in which YHWH is described in just such terms; the fact remains that the deity’s record in other passages gives the lie to such white-washing. A father who brutally beats or kills his children for failing to honor him properly does not earn the epithets “just,” “loving,” etc., by behaving more generously on other occasions.

But Biblical exegesis is not the issue. The point is that those who say “Everything happens for a reason” mean more than that some intelligent power of unspecified character makes everything happen. They mean that this power does so only for ends that are of some earthly benefit, either to the victim of suffering or to others. That is why devotees of this saying are given to using it to offer consolation to the afflicted. But to do so merely crowns theological presumption with obtuseness toward human suffering. For whatever the human benefit might be for the sake of which God inflicts misfortune, in serious cases the victim would almost never accept the bargain if he or she had a choice in it. Moreover, if God, or whatever the great stage manager is supposed to be, makes everything happen for a reason, then it is difficult to forgive that party for effecting a good end by evil rather than by good means. If the invisible puppet master can, say, take away a couple’s child to teach them compassion (and if this does not seem a convincing example of this line of thought, some other equally puerile rubbish can be put in its place), surely he or she or it should be able to effect the same end without inflicting such tragedy upon people.

Gladstone concludes with these remarks:

I’m not saying all suffering is random and pointless, or that nothing good can ever come out of a bad situation, but the arrogance that comes from the belief that tragic events are always justified as part of a larger plan is just intolerable. I don’t know why bad things happen, but I do know that no one who throws this cliché around knows either. So to everyone keeping this miserable expression alive, please leave people to their misery and save your cliché for yourself the next time you’re walking in the woods and step into a bear trap after getting shot in the eye by a drunken hunter.

This paragraph might leave those who are given to saying “Everything happens for a reason” complacent in the opinion that they are doing no wrong as long as they refrain from offering that formula for the consolation of others. The declared subject of the article, after all, is “phrases that make you look [“look”? not “sound”?] like an idiot.” But the saying is to be despised on its own account, regardless of the social use to which it is put. It may be handy to have reasons for this summarized here.

(1) The saying is logically confused: it applies to mere happenings a form of expression that applies intelligibly only to intentional actions.

(2) By means of this logical confusion, it assumes the air of a truism, which it decidedly is not. To take it for a truism is foolish, and to offer it to others as a truism is chicanery.

(3) Its half-hidden meaning is that all mere happenings are effected by an inscrutable power for the sake of some benefit to those affected by those happenings. This is an extravagant presumption without foundation in any known facts. To assert it as fact is therefore a fatuous piece of self-conceit.

(4) It implies a theodicy according to which all suffering and misfortune is for the sake of a good that outweighs the evil. This trivializes all suffering and misfortune.

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

I have to confess that I have always been somewhat uncomfortable with the title that I originally chose for this weblog—Skeptical Jew. As I noted in one entry (“Funny Word, Funnier Concept”), the word “Jew,” perhaps in some degree because of its rather curt sound, carries with it an echo of the scornful tone with which it has at times been uttered—so much so that many non-Jews shy away from using it for fear of sounding anti-Jewish. I was perhaps depending on the insider’s prerogative in entitling my blog “Skeptical Jew”: “Jew” is the standard classificatory term in English for one of such origins as mine, so I can use it with impunity. But I am suspicious on principle of reliance on such insider’s privileges. What is more, I could still hear that echo. So I retained a degree of discomfort with putting the word, as a description of myself, into the title of my blog.

Recently, another consideration has added to my misgivings. Although I have made more frequent entries to the blog of late than I was doing for several months, I have found myself with less and less to say about Jewish topics. This was perhaps inevitable, my knowledge of Judaism being as meager as it is (meager, I mean, not by comparison with what people in general know, but by comparison with what Jews of extensive religious education know). One of the aims with which I started this blog was to reflect on my perplexing condition of being a Jew by something more than descent and upbringing alone, yet less than belief. But since writing three rather inconclusive entries on this topic early on (“Three Ways of Looking at Being Jewish,” “Reply to Comment on Jewish Identity,” and “On Being Skeptical”), I have had no new thoughts about it.

I have decided, therefore, to drop the “Jewish” theme from my title while keeping the skeptical one. “Observations” is a loose enough term to capture anything that I may wish to do here, while “skeptical” describes my temperament and my epistemological orientation rather than an object of concern. I hope that I shall have further things to say about Judaism and being Jewish. But I will no longer make any effort to bend my thoughts toward them any more than they are naturally inclined to go.

A clip from the video Dara Ó Briain Talks Funny, with a partial transcript.

The clip embedded above is an excerpt from a video recording of Irish comic Dara Ó Briain (pronounced “dah-ra o-bree-an”) in performance at the Hammersmith Apollo Theatre in London in 2008. In this clip, he addresses himself to popular forms of ignorance and misunderstanding regarding matters of scientific knowledge (“a general kind of lack of knowledge about science,” as he says at 0:20). Ó Briain can be a bit rough on those who propagate defective forms of thinking (“Jesus, homeopaths get on my nerves!”), and his performance, being stand-up comedy rather than a lecture, does not include much presentation of evidence pertinent to the evaluation of claims: hence my description of this as a “rough introduction” to critical thinking. But his act shares with critical thinking the aims of exposing folly and revealing truth.

Of course, a performance like this is made to be seen and heard, not to be read in transcribed form. Nonetheless, I find much of it so pithy and so well said that I like to have the words before my eyes. So by all means, watch the video before you read what follows. But once you have watched it, if you find Ó Briain’s words as well chosen as I do, you may want to refer to the following transcript of the stretch of this performance running from about 1:40 to 4:20.

But there’s a kind of notion that “Every opinion is equally valid.” My
arse! Bloke who’s a professor of dentistry for forty years does not
have a debate with some idiot [eejet] who removes his teeth with string
and a door, right? It’s nonsense! And this happens all the time with
medical stuff on the television. You’ll have a doctor on and they’ll
talk to the doctor and be all “Doctor this” and “Doctor that,” and
“What happened there?” and “Doctor, isn’t it awful?”, right? And then
the doctor will be talking about something with all the benefit of
research and medical evidence, and they’ll turn away from the
doctor in
the name of “balance,” and turn to some—quack—witch
doctor—homeopath—horseshit peddler on the other side of the
studio!

And I’m sorry if you’re into homeopathy. It’s water! How often does it
need to be said? It’s just water. You’re healing yourself; why don’t
you give yourself the credit? Jesus, homeopaths get on my nerves, with
the old “Well, science doesn’t know everything”! Well, science knows
it doesn’t know everything, otherwise it would stop. But it’s aware of
it, you know? Just because science doesn’t know everything doesn’t mean that you
can fill in the gaps with whatever fairy tale most appeals to you.

“Oh, well, the great thing about homeopathy is that you can’t overdose on it.”
Well, you can fucking drown! I’m sorry: it seems harsh, and I used to
be much more generous about it, but right now I would take homeopaths
and I would put them in a big sack with psychics, astrologers, and
priests, and I’d close the top of the sack with string, and I’d hit them
all with sticks. And I really wouldn’t worry who got the worst of the
belt of the sticks, right? Anyone who in answer to the difficult questions in life, to “I don’t
know what happens after I die,” or “Please, what happens after my loved
ones die?” or “How can I stop myself dying?”—the big questions—gives
them an easy bullshit answer, and you go, “Do you have any evidence for
that?”, and they go, “There’s more to life than evidence”: get in the
fucking sack!

I’m sorry, “Herbal medicine! Oh, herbal medicine’s been around for
thousands of years!” Indeed it has, and then we tested it all, and the
stuff that worked became “medicine,” and the rest of it is just a nice
bowl of soup and some potpourri, so knock yourselves out. “Chinese
medicine, oh, Chinese medicine! But there are billions of Chinese,
Chinese medicine must be working.” Here’s the skinny on Chinese
medicine: A hundred years ago the life expectancy in China was 30. The
life expectancy in China at the moment is 73. And it’s not feckin’
tiger penis that turned it around for the Chinese. Didn’t do much for
the tiger either, if you don’t mind me pointing out.

There is one further joke at the expense of the Chinese before the next burst of laughter and applause from the audience, but I have omitted it, as I think it appears to disadvantage when transcribed.

A truism is a statement that is self-evidently true. A false truism
would be a statement
taken for a truism that is in fact not one, either because it is true
but not self-evidently so or because it is not true at all. In the
latter case, it is doubly false: it is not a truism, and it is
not true. The saying “Everything happens for a reason” is
a false trusim of this double-dyed sort.

How does a falsehood get mistaken for a
truism? Typically by a
woolly-minded, or a devious, confusion with a truism. The saying
“Everything happens for a reason” gets its hold on people’s minds, or
at least their mouths, by a confusion of elements of two
truths that are entirely distinct from it and from each other.

If you deny the
saying “Everything happens for a reason,” people who are attached to it
may react by saying, “So you think things can happen for no reason at
all?” And now you may find yourself embarrassed; for an
affirmative answer seems to imply that you think that things can
happen without any cause. Thus, the saying in question gains
some appearance of cogency from its suggestion of the entirely distinct thought that for
everything that happens, there is a reason why it happens. The
latter
thought is, if not a truism, at least a truth, apart from such arcane reaches as quantum mechanics
and cosmogony.
It means
merely that everything that happens is a consequence of some cause or
causes.

Why, for example, does the sun go higher in the sky in
summer than in winter? Because the earth’s axis is tilted relative
to its orbit, and summer is the time of year when the polar tilt in a
given hemisphere is toward the sun, winter the time when it is
away from the sun. Why has my car’s fuel mileage
suddenly gotten worse? I don’t know why, but I will take it to a repair
shop so that a mechanic can find the reason. And so on.
These are examples of the use of the concept of a reason why
something
happens.

The phrase “for a reason” has
an entirely different meaning and
a
different range of application. We can ask for what reason someone does
this or that, but it makes no sense
to ask about the reason for an occurrence that is not the act of an
intelligent agent. For
instance, say a creaking sound comes through the ceiling. We might ask:
“Why does that happen?” The answer might be: “Someone is walking around
in
the apartment upstairs.” That is the reason, or a reason, why the
creaking
happens. We might then ask further: “Why is the person upstairs walking
around?” The answer might be: “She has things to do around her
apartment (and
why
shouldn’t she walk around up there, anyway?).” That is the reason—or,
again, a reason—for her
walking around, or her reason
for walking around.

Now consider the question: “For what reason does the ceiling creak?” This is a conflation
of two different forms of expression. The ceiling does not creak for a
reason; the ceiling does not have a reason for creaking. There is a
reason why the ceiling creaks, but that is another matter entirely. It
is
senseless to attribute reasons to the ceiling because the ceiling is
not an
intelligent agent. If the person asking this ill-formed question meant
exactly what he or she says, then he or she would have to think that the ceiling is an agent and that creaking is
something
that it does intentionally; for only then would it be intelligible to
ask for what reason it does so. More likely, though, the question is
just an affected or confused way of asking, “What causes the ceiling
to creak?” (or more simply, “Why is the ceiling creaking?”).

So it is fair to say, “For everything that happens, there is a
reason why it happens,” or to say, “Everything that
is done intentionally is done for a reason.” The former is a truth, arguably a truism, and the latter certainly a truism, as it merely explicates the meaning of the
expressions “intentional” and “(to do something) for a reason.” But
when
people say “Everything happens for a reason,” they do not mean either
one of these things, though their utterance gains its appearance of plausibility from its suggestion of both. What do they mean? It is not easy to
answer this
question, as the utterance gains its hold on people’s minds precisely
by its confusion and obscurity.

One cannot translate nonsense into
sense,
but one can sometimes identify a coherent thought that is half-expressed, half-concealed in an incoherent utterance. In the case of the saying “Everything happens
for a reason,” the half-expressed, half-concealed thought is that everything
that happens
does so because some intelligent agent, whether human or
superhuman, makes it happen
for some reason. But the saying can only appear truistic by omitting all
mention of agency. It incoherently combines the expression “for a
reason,” which implies an agent, with “things happen,” which implies no
agent (as I noted in my previous entry in this blog with reference to a recent utterance by Newt Gingrich).

Once the
implicit thought is made explicit, it loses all appearance of truism,
and indeed of plausibility. If someone said, “Everything that
happens is intentionally made
to happen by some agent or other,” the utterance, if it were not simply dismissed with a snort, would provoke such questions as “How do you know that? What
agent or agents do you have in mind? What
basis can you possibly have for such an extravagant claim? Do you
seriously mean to imply that when I sneeze, there is a sneeze-spirit of
some kind that makes me sneeze? Or that God pushes the molecules around to tickle my
nose?” And so on. Few people would be willing to commit themselves to
such a fatuous claim. Yet millions of speakers are
unashamed to utter and to accept a saying in which this very thought is
conveyed by subterfuge.

The saying is not just confused, preposterous, and dishonest: it is also
insulting to victims of serious misfortune. Those who say to such
persons, “Everything happens for a reason,” are almost certainly
playing either Polyannas
or Job’s
comforters. The Polyannas mean that your misfortune serves some good
end
beyond itself. The Job’s comforters mean that you had it coming to you.
Both meanings are obnoxious, as they trivialize the victim’s suffering
and even put the victim in the wrong for feeling it. I include the
qualification “almost certainly” in my statement because it
is just possible that such people intend a different meaning: they
could (though I doubt that many do) mean
that God, or whatever spirit caused your misfortune, did so for a
reason that has nothing to do with justice or goodness. The point is not to console the sufferers but to remind them that we are all helplessly in the shit together. This, to my
mind, is the primary thought of the Book of Job, as I have argued in a
previous entry, contra
Rabbi Harold Kushner; though most people, Rabbi Kushner among them,
prefer to impose a more conciliatory meaning upon that terrible tale.

Friday, March 11, 2011

Newt Gingrich on his dark past: “There’s no question that at
times in my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt about
this
country, that I worked far too hard, and that things happened in my
life
that were not appropriate.”

Former Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich recently gave an
interview to David Brody of the
Christian Broadcasting Network. The first of the three clips posted by
Brody at CBN.com (March 8, 2011) begins with him asking Gingrich the
following rather
elliptical question (the transcriptions that follow are my own):

You know the question, and I’m not going to ask it the way
everybody else will ask it, but as it relates to the past, and some of
those personal issues that you’ve had. You’ve talked about how God is a
forgiving God, and I’d like you to expand upon that: as you went through
some of those difficulties, how you saw God’s forgiving nature in all
of that.

Such is Brody’s delicacy that he never actually says what “the
question” is. Perhaps he is presuming that his
viewers will know that Gingrich is now on his third marriage; that his
relationship with the woman who became wife no. 2 started while he was
married to wife no. 1; that he initiated a divorce from wife no. 1 when
she was recovering from surgery for uterine cancer; that his
relationship with the woman who became wife no. 3 started while he was
married to
wife no. 2; that he initiated a divorce from wife no. 2 on the day
when she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis; and that he has a
history of further marital infidelities. (For Gingrich’s marital
history, see the
pages at About.com on Gingrich’s first
and second
marriages; for his other infidelities, see this
article at Frontline.)
These matters are presumably the “personal issues”
to which Brody vaguely refers. Gingrich
replies:

Well, I mean, first of all, there’s no question that at
times in my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt about
this
country, that I worked far too hard, and that things happened in my
life
that were not appropriate. And what I can tell you is that when I did
things that were wrong, I wasn’t trapped in situation ethics, I was
doing things that were wrong, and yet—I was doing them. I found that I
felt compelled to seek God’s forgiveness—not God’s understanding, but
God’s forgiveness—and that I do believe in a forgiving God. And I think
most people, deep down in their hearts, hope there’s a forgiving God.

Now, to be fair, Brody did not ask Gingrich to confess his misdeeds, but only to tell how he understood God’s forgiveness in relation to those misdeeds, whatever they were. Nonetheless, to speak intelligibly of being forgiven, one must at lest acknowledge misconduct. And Gingrich does indeed get around to saying that he “was doing things that were wrong.” It is interesting, though, to see how much evasion and obfuscation he commits before he gets there. Consider his first
sentence: At
times in my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt about
this
country, I worked far too hard, and things happened in my life
that were not appropriate. There are so many forms of dishonesty
and cowardice packed into this fairly short utterance that it is
instructive to try to identify them individually.

(1) Let us start with the most obvious one: “partially driven by how
passionately I felt about this country.” One is reminded of Samuel
Johnson’s remark upon the resort to patriotism by scoundrels. Here
Gingrich suggests that the ultimate motive of his marital misconduct
was love of country—or, as the headline of an article by Jack Stuef at Wonkette
more satirically puts
the claim, that “Newt Gingrich committed adultery because America made
him horny.” By trying to attribute his bad conduct to a good motive,
Gingrich
follows the most commonly practiced strategy of reply to the
bullshit interview question “What do you consider your greatest
weakness?”, namely to admit to a weakness that is really a strength. In
fact, he virtually repeats the best-known bullshit answer: “I sometimes
care about my work too much!”

(2) To be sure, Gingrich includes the qualifier “partially,” as if
sensing that, without it, his assertion might be a more blatant absurdity
than even people who consider him a credible political figure would be able to accept. But that merely compounds the
disingenuousness of his statement. The absurdity is not the idea that
love of country can be the sole
motive to betraying one’s marriage partner, but that it can be such a
motive at all. The addition of the word “partially” is a sop thrown to those credulous or dull-minded enough to miss this point.

(3) Perhaps what Gingrich means to attribute to his love of his
country is not his marital infidelities but only his working “far too
hard,” with the implication that this in turn created the conditions
leading to such misconduct.
But how so? We have only the bare conjunction of the phrases “I worked
far too
hard” and “things happened in my life
that were not appropriate.” There is no indication of how those two
facts are supposed to be related. The attempt to draw blame from his
conduct off into the forgivable or even laudable habit of “working too
hard” is lost in
vagueness.

(4) Compare the following two phrases:

(a) I worked hard.
(b) Things happened.

Notice that the speaker of (a) identifies himself as an agent, while
the speaker of (b) does not identify any agent at all, but only uses the
vague grammatical subject “things.” When Gingrich is
speaking of conduct that may be reckoned to his credit, he identifies
himself as an agent: “I worked far too hard.” When he is speaking of
his misconduct—perhaps to describe him as “speaking of it” gives
him too much credit; “obliquely alluding to it” seems nearer the
mark—he disappears in a puff of evasion: “things happened in my life.” This is, of course, a variant of that watchword of the inveterately irresponsible, “Mistakes were made.”

(5) “Not appropriate.” I have saved the worst for last. I know of no
phrase whose use so concisely manifests the collapse of moral
intelligence as does this one.
But that collapse is not at all peculiar to Gingrich; it can be
observed wherever English is spoken. An epidemic of stultification
seems to have robbed people of the command of intelligent moral
vocabulary. Having apparently lost command of terms like “outrageous”
(now more commonly used, idiotically, as a term of praise),
“unconscionable,” “irresponsible,” “cruel,” “selfish,” “base,”
“dishonest,” and so forth, to say nothing of simple and obvious ones
like “bad” and “wrong,” people wishing to speak of misconduct find
nothing at their disposal but a puffed-up term of etiquette.

Surely we all know what “appropriate” means. A fur hat is not appropriate to wear with a linen suit; “fuck” is an inappropriate word to use in polite company; a Phillips-head screwdriver is not appropriate
for driving slotted-head screws. The word “appropriate” is what
logicians call a two-place predicate, one that indicates a relation
between two things: paradigmatically, a is appropriate to b.
What is not appropriate to one thing is typically appropriate to some
other. To describe acts of marital infidelity as “things that were not
appropriate” implies that their only fault is that they were done at
the wrong time, on the wrong occasion, or with the wrong person, in
some sense of “wrong” not yet specified—as, for instance, a plaid tie
is wrong (inappropriate) to wear with astriped shirt.

Of course, it is safe to presume that Gingrich, like all other people
who use this cretinous and obfuscating jargon, does not intend any of
these implications. He surely does not mean that he chose the wrong
women with whom to betray his wives, or the wrong occasions for doing
so. But what does he mean? An associate with whom I was discussing
Gingrich’s interview on Facebook made the comment: “The
real mistake here is thinking that Mr. Gingrich attaches any meaning
other than dog-whistle meaning to his words.” Setting aside the
question whether Gingrich has pitched his whistle correctly for the
evangelical Christian audience that he hopes to influence, this seems
to me correct. When Gingrich describes his former conduct as “not
appropriate,” there is not much to be said about what, if anything, he
means by his words, in the sense of intending something capable of
being true or false. Yet he surely means to do something by uttering
those words. I would say that he means to indicate repentance without
actually acknowledging misconduct. He does not admit to having acted
selfishly, exploitatively, deceptively, cruelly, or irresponsibly; he
does not admit to having acted at all; he simply describes “things that
happened” in his life as “not appropriate.”

Well, that’s my attempt to analyze the utterance of this paragon of dishonesty and moral cowardice. Does anyone see anything that I have missed?